John the Baptist as a Rewritten Figure in Luke-Acts

Christina Michelsen Chauchot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000338768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

John the Baptist as a Rewritten Figure in Luke-Acts compares the Gospel of Luke's account of John's ministry with those of Matthew, Mark, and John to make the case for the hypertextual relationship between the synoptic gospels.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I situates the Gospel of Luke within the broader context of biblical rewritings and makes the general case that a rewriting strategy can be detected in Luke, while Parts II and III combined offer a more detailed and specific argument for Luke's refiguring of the public ministry of John the Baptist through the use of omitted, new, adapted, and reserved material. While the "two source hypothesis" typically presupposes the independence of Luke and Matthew in their rewritings of Mark and Q, Chauchot argues that Luke was heavily reliant on Matthew as suggested by the "L/M hypothesis". Approaching the Baptist figure in the synoptic gospels from a literary-critical perspective, Chauchot examines "test cases" of detailed comparative analysis between them to argue that the Gospel of Luke makes thematic changes upon John the Baptist and is best characterized as a highly creative reshaping of Matthew and Mark.

Making a contribution to current research in the field of New Testament exegesis, the book is key reading for students, scholars, and clergy interested in New Testament hermeneutics and Gospel writing.

Part I

The Gospel of Luke as a biblical rewriting

Introduction

Biblical rewritings and the L/M hypothesis

The present study is a contribution to current research in the field of New Testament exegesis. It approaches the canonical gospels from a literary-critical perspective, employing insights from recent research on biblical rewritings in order to shed light on synoptic studies and the study of gospel interpretation. I here distinguish between biblical rewritings as a large category of biblical texts such as, for example, the New Testament texts, and rewritten Bible/rewritten Scripture as a narrow subcategory, which has been used both as a narrow genre definition and as a term to describe the composing and interpreting methods employed. In 2005 Moshe J. Bernstein stressed the importance of separating the method from the genre. Bernstein qualified the term “rewritten Bible” as a useful tool for classification: “It is necessary to distinguish between the process ‘rewriting the Bible’ and the genre ‘rewritten Bible’” (Bernstein 2005: 195). In my view the latter is a literary classification, which the former is not. The narrow utilization of the term serves to place it as a subcategory of biblical interpretation in antiquity. Bernstein warns against replacing the term: “If we were to give up the category ‘rewritten Bible’ as a genre by using it in the looser sense employed by many scholars, then we shall simply have to find another generic term to replace its narrow use” (Bernstein 2005: 196).

The following discussion of rewritten Bible will consider the problem of anachronism in dealing with the term “biblical” literature in a pre-canonical context. Based on Geza Vermes’ focus on “rewritten Bible” in literature from Second Temple Judaism (Vermes 1961), I seek to trace the development of a creative textual strategy in the synoptic gospels as exemplified by the portrait of John the Baptist in the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. I shall refer to the Lukan double work as “Luke-Acts”. Cadbury introduced this expression in 1926 (Cadbury 1926). When I refer to the Gospel of Luke as “Luke” I refer to the written text transmitted in the earliest collections of manuscripts. I base my thematic analyses on Luke in Nestle-Aland (2012), conscious that it is an artificial reconstruction of different manuscripts. The portrait of John the Baptist in Luke can be compared to that of the other three canonical gospels. My analysis is not based upon text critical assessments. The aim is to compare overtly different narrative strategies in the four reconstructed gospels. I seek to answer the following two questions: Is it possible to conceive of the evolution of the Baptist portraits throughout the gospels as reflections of different theological agendas? And, could these portraits disclose a particular Lukan conception of John’s public ministry that is different from a supposedly earlier conception in Mark and Matthew?

My investigation focuses on the narrative strategy in Luke-Acts through an analysis of John the Baptist as a “rewritten figure”. The four gospels all have an introductory paragraph on the public ministry of the Baptist. Their accounts, however, differ greatly from one another. Of these, Luke’s presentation is the most extensive, sharing material with the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and John, and with Josephus’ Antiquities, especially pertaining to the ethical aspect of John’s proclamation. Moreover, in Luke’s diptych infancy narrative about the births of John and Jesus, and in Acts, Luke adds special material on the Baptist figure, whereas Paul’s letters as the earliest writings of the New Testament have no mention of John the Baptist, nor of his baptism.

Throughout my analysis, it will be demonstrated how Luke’s depiction of John the Baptist can be considered a creative rewriting of Mark and Matthew rather than a “mere” compilation of Mark and a presumed lost source labelled Q. This approach is based on on-going exegetical research on the synoptic problem where the “Two Source Hypothesis” (2SH) has been disproven. Representatives of rewriting theories such as the “L/M hypothesis” imply that Luke rewrites both Mark and Matthew. Francis Watson therefore proposes the term the “L/M (= Luke/Matthew) theory”. He argues: “In the context of an attempt to show that the phenomena of the synoptic gospels makes best sense on the theory that Luke had both Mark and Matthew at his disposal as he composed his own gospel” (Watson 2013: 118–119). As we shall see in the following, both the 2SH and the L/M hypothesis presuppose that Luke displays some kind of literary dependence on one or more of the other gospels. Proponents of the 2SH do, however, strongly disagree on the number of already known or transmitted sources and on the question of the chronology of Matthew and Luke’s redaction. These current explanations of the synoptic problem presuppose two different attitudes towards sources and disclose thereby different comprehensions of the status of the text.

I shall demonstrate that Vermes’ concept of rewritten Bible is part of a larger hermeneutical perspective, and show to what extent it differs from structuralism’s concept of “narrative expansion”. In approaching the gospels as biblical rewritings, I am faced by a hermeneutical question: what kind of truth is pretended by the text? Before the hermeneutical question can be addressed, I need to analyse the compositional and exegetical aspect of this particular rewriting. Does the Lukan narrative resemble a reliable compilation of sources, or a creative rewriting of sources? These questions demand a critical and constructive approach to Luke as a biblical rewriting. As early as 1966, R.T. Simpson argued: “It seems very likely that there will always be some doubt about the sources of St Luke, as of the other synoptic gospels, just because the evangelists saw themselves not as compilers, but as authors” (Simpson 1965–1966: 283).

Michael D. Goulder’s Luke: A New Paradigm (1989) marks an attempt to present the Gospel of Luke as a rewriting of Matthew. He also proposes an alternative paradigm to what he labels the standard paradigm on the relationship between the gospels. Of the eight hypotheses in the standard paradigm of the 2SH, Goulder recognizes only the third which claims Markan priority (Goulder 1989: 5). The sixth of his eight new hypotheses introduces Luke as rewritten Matthew:

Luke wrote his Gospel about 90 for a more Gentile church, combining Mark and Matthew. He re-wrote Matthew’s birth narratives with the aid of the Old Testament, and he added new material of his own creation, largely parables, where his genius lay. The new material can almost always be understood as a Lucan development of matter in Matthew. There was hardly any L (Sondergut).

(Goulder 1989: 22–23)

The ambitious layout of Goulder’s commentary tends to explain the entire gospel in relation to a presupposed reworking of Matthew.

My primary aim is to examine whether there are examples of Luke’s knowledge and use of Matthew in the material that they both share about John the Baptist’s public ministry. My criticism of the 2SH will be given through a detailed exegesis of John the Baptist in Luke 3:1–20 in order to demonstrate that the specific material which is shared by Matthew 3:1–17 and Luke 3:1–20, traditionally called the double tradition material, is better explained by the L/M hypothesis than by the 2SH. This material can alternatively be studied as modified material according to the method of the biblical rewritings, which was a common literary practice at the time of redaction. First, Matthew and Luke are potentially not rewriting a common lost source, and second, it has not been proven that they make independent use of Mark. More precisely, Luke has not necessarily edited Mark independently of Matthew.

Gospel interpretation and the synoptic problem

This book tests the literary relationship between the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, with a focus on Luke’s rewriting of the Baptist figure. The 2SH is at the centre of my investigation and I contest the presumption that Matthew and Luke used Mark independently of one another. One pillar of the 2SH is the recognition of Mark as prior to Matthew and Luke. A second pillar is the assumption of the existence of a (hypothetical) source Q as an explanation for the double tradition, which is the material Matthew and Luke have in common beyond their dependence on Mark. My first objection to the 2SH is the lack of material evidence for a common source to Matthew and Luke. Not a single fragment of Q has ever been found. The 2SH presupposes a result of rewriting independently rendered in Matthew and Luke, and Q remains a reconstruction. To deduce from a written and transmitted result is to extrapolate from known to unknown. The 2SH creates an unnecessary supplement, for we already have knowledge of, and access to, two gospels that tell stories about the same figures. It should be our priority to assess and demonstrate if, and to what extent, there is a clear and observable literary dependency of Luke on Matthew before we turn to speculations on a lost source. The Q source as it is presented, for instance, by James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffmann and John S. Kloppenborg in The Critical Edition of Q: A Synopsis Including the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Mark and Thomas with English, German and French Translation of Q and Thomas (2000) is an artificial reconstruction based on a deduction from Matthew and Luke. Their project attempts at reconstructing the wording of Q. Robinson expresses the ambition that the work should be “equally usable for scholars of all opinions and thus function as a standard tool in our discipline” (Robinson et al. 2000: lxvi). I base my investigation on a literary analysis presupposing that Luke could be a later harmonization of both Mark and Matthew’s rewriting of Mark. Both Geza Vermes and Philip Alexander have argued that biblical rewriting is a type of composition that is characterized by harmonizing activity. Vermes defines a rewritten Bible text, as “a narrative that follows Scripture but includes a substantial amount of supplements and interpretative developments” in his revised edition of Schürer (1986: 326). According to Philip Alexander’s formal literary characteristics of rewritten Bible texts (points b, d, f, and i), these aim at “a synthesis of the whole tradition (both biblical and extra-biblical) within a biblical framework: they seek to unify the tradition on a biblical base” (Alexander 1988: 118).

Three points indicate a “new” relationship between Matthew and Luke. First, Luke has written a sequel to his account of the life of Jesus Christ in the form of a history, which relates the acts of his immediate successors, the apostles Peter and Paul. Mikeal C. Parsons argues that the prologue in Acts 1:1–2 presents Acts as Luke’s sequel: “In it, Luke will continue to relate the events that transpired among the earliest Christians, from shortly after Jesus’ death until just before Paul’s” (Parsons 2007: 2). Recent scholarship dates Acts to the beginning of the second century.¹ This dating means that Luke’s gospel may have been written much later than has hitherto been supposed.² Matthew’s gospel could have been written several decades prior to that of Luke, whose author could ostensibly have read the work of the former. Furthermore, it establishes Luke as a “writing reader” of Matthew in the same way as the latter has rewritten Mark, and in light of the way Josephus and Pseudo-Philo have rewritten biblical literature.³ Finally, in the shape of an expanded narrative, Luke has inserted veiled commentaries and made subtle changes to John the Baptist. These changes are visible as new propositions on material we find in Mark and Matthew. The late attestation of Luke is therefore important for my analysis. Proponents of the 2SH seem to acknowledge that Matthew and Luke both rewrote Mark creatively. Yet, they argue that the nearly contemporary evangelists did so independently of one another. My second objection to the 2SH concerns the incoherence of this presupposition. If a majority of scholars admit that Matthew and Luke rewrote Mark, why is there resistance to even considering the potential literary dependency of Luke on Matthew? This question concerns the hypothesis of literary dependency between Matthew and Luke with either Lukan or Matthean posteriority.

To test whether Luke rewrote the Markan and the Matthean portraits of John the Baptist, a short introduction to the theoretical approaches of rewritten Bible and of the synoptic problem is needed. Does the rewriting perspective inform the interpretive process in gospel writing? Could this interpretive process be an alternative approach to the synoptic problem? These questions will be examined in Chapters 1 and 2.

Luke 3:1–20 as a case study

In this section, I shall present my material for testing the pervasive hypothesis of a lost Q source, offering my alternative proposal of sources. It prepares for my subsequent reading of Luke’s re...